My father used to tell me that India does not value its real treasures. I knew he was not talking about objects or commodities or even the great historic monuments. He was dealing with intangibles.
He was referring to a teacher as a resource. A teacher can set fire to the imagination even in a third-rate, ramshackled school. A teacher becomes the seeding ground of the nursery of dissent even in a bureaucratic, third-rate university. A teacher is life-giving by definition. And André Béteille was one such person.
André was exemplary. For him, the university was the cathedral of the 21st century. The class provided the daily source of the sacred. For him, the everyday lecture sustained the traditions of scholarship and knowledge that the university has protected for centuries.
We must realise that André was himself one such person. When he was at the Delhi University, it had over a dozen such intellectuals: there was Sumit Sarkar in the history department, Randhir Singh in political science, Amartya Sen in economics, and Veena Das and Jit Uberoi in sociology.
The very presence of these people gave scholarship both a sense of dignity and play, and made academics an attractive career to follow. I must emphasise that for André Béteille, everydayness was a ritual. For him, the lecture hall, the seminar room and the conference hall—they were where the three great sacred events of the university were embodied.
One of the best ways of understanding the creativity, resilience and resistance of the university is to look at the Emergency. The Emergency marked the university as resistance incarnate. One can think of a few examples.
I remember that when my colleague Hira Singh, a combative Marxist, was arrested, it was André and Veena who took the case to the court. They fought vehemently for Professor Singh. I was amazed watching it, because no two people disagreed with Hira Singh more. I realised that the Emergency emphasised the fraternity of difference that sustained democracy.
What was even more amusing was that when Hira Singh came back from jail to attend a staff meeting, he and André fought vociferously over every issue on the meeting’s agenda. For André, what Max Weber had said about science is true for teaching as a vocation.
I must recollect another event. During the final phases of the Emergency, newspapers started the campaign to raise 5,000 signatures against it. André and Veena were deeply committed to it. We organised a campaign over two evenings and collected more than 5,000 signatures.
When we were organising the final package, we were confronted by a strange event: about a dozen students came protesting, even crying, claiming that their parents wanted their signatures back. They were mainly children of bureaucrats. Many of the organisers refused to respond to them, saying it was too tedious a task to retrieve the signature. But André intervened, saying they have the right to recall. He explained later that the Emergency was a muddled-up time and one should allow for a change in attitude.
I remember André’s reputation as a teacher went sky-high when Ralf Dahrendorf, director of the London School of Economics, came personally to invite him to accept the chair at the hallowed institution. André refused, saying he was too involved in India. I asked him later if there was any other reason. He looked at me and said, “Have you noticed that children in England don’t look happy today? They look under pressure. I want my daughter Radha to have India as a playground for a longer period.”
For André, teaching and research were hyphenated activities. He brought an everyday discipline to research which I envy. He confessed one day that he wrote at least two paragraphs a day. I sniggered and then he responded, “Two paragraphs a day is a book a year.” I felt embarrassed because in the first two years of research, I had not turned out a single paragraph.
It became even more embarrassing when I realised progress reports were due. I had forgotten to submit them, but the research committee cleared me. I then realised André had filed my reports, and when I went to thank him, all he said was, “I hope I have caught your inimitable style”.
For André, sociology as research required gossip and storytelling, and he was a remarkable storyteller. When I was working in Kolkata on the history of science, he told me I must know about Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, Nirmal Kumar Bose, Meghnad Saha, Jagadish Chandra Bose—and then he added that science without folktales is impoverished.
André was insistent that every student must master the basic domains of culture. He wanted us to talk about music, discuss science and celebrate politics. I remember he was dismissive of a leading political scientist’s work by insisting that the latter did not know the difference between Dostoevsky and a block of wood. André felt every anthropologist was a witness to culture and must understand the grammar of that culture.
We used to quarrel very often. Many a time, in desperation, he would say, “How do I civilise you?” One day, we quarrelled so bitterly over a chapter of my thesis that I hid in the library for a week. He summoned me, looked impassively and offered me a book. It was a translation of his teacher anthropologist N K Bose’s writings. On it was inscribed: “To Shiv Visvanathan, from André Béteille, neither a patron, nor a guru.” The message was clear. It captured André as an upholder of traditions, yet one who emphasised individuality and integrity.
André loved quality—he treated it like a sensorium. I remember when I was finishing my thesis and boasting about it. He said, “You haven’t yet passed the test of quality control.” He told me that my three evaluators would be an outstanding sociologist of science, a great sociologist of India and a leading science policy expert. They were Edward Shils, M N Srinivas and Ashok Parthasarathi. When they toasted my thesis, André smiled wickedly and claimed, “He is still to realise his potential.”
One misses that wry humour, that celebration of scholarship and that tolerance for difference. I wish one could invent a few Andrés for the present-day university. We need that dignity, that commitment and that power of storytelling which sustained the ideal of freedom in the university.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)
(svcsds@gmail.com)